Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

ing were political activists, members of the clergy, troubled students, and-forsome reason-people who had received honors from the department itse1f. Acommission appointed by the mayor determined that none of the 3,400 files couldbe legitimately maintained, and ordered them destroyed. But the files, and theirinaccuracies, had already been passed on to other agencies.46The harm of such exaggeration is multiplied as misinformation is spreadfrom one agency to others. For example, in 1973 the Seattle Police Department'sintelligence division opened a file on a local Chicano activist. The AmericanFriends Service Committee described the report's transformation as it changedhands:It began: "Modus Operandi-participant in demonstrations, supporting UFWx Safeway [sic] , establishment of EI Centro." His only police record is for failureto disperse during a demonstration. By 1976, however, in describing him tothe Portland Police Intelligence Division, Seattle Police stated, "M.O. Chicanoactivist-advocates terrorist acts." There is no information in the SPD intelligencefiles to support such a defamatory and damaging claim.47Inaccuracies and distortions are phenomena familiar to anyone who readseven standard police reports, but the potential for mis-reporting is amplifiedby the nature of undercover work (especially when informants are paid for theinformation) .Both the pressures and inducements, along with the sense of guilt that requiredthe betrayer to find some justification for his betrayal, tend to produce taintedinformation. All too frequently it is inaccurate, highly selective, and basedon sinister and unwarranted inferences. Where a literal version of a target'sutterances would seem innocent, the informer will insist on stressing the connotations;conversely, where the language is figurative or metaphysical [sic] theinformer reports it as literally intended. Most important of all, he seizes on thetransient fantasies of the powerless-rhetoric and images not intended to beacted upon-and transforms them into conspiracies whose purpose and commitmentare wholly alien to their volatile and ambiguous context. 48These interpretive practices underscore the symbolic value of red squad files.At first a simple administrative tool for collecting and organizing evidence, thesefiles, like so much in the field of intelligence, quickly became a means of intimidation,and eventually became an end in themselves, serving to legitimize the redsquad's other activities.49More often than not, the reported violence was only a much-exaggerated pretext for heavier repression. Frank Donner describes the pattern as it appeared inPhiladelphia:Based on information typically supplied by a street tipster or casual informant,or "discovered" through several weeks of intensive surveillance bythe CD [the Civil Disobedience Unit] , police would raid a private residencewhere they assertedly found explosives, guns, or inflammatory literature.A torrent of Rizzo-inspired publicity would then link the raided premisesand the seized material to a group of militants, which, it usually suggested,was part of a larger and more powerful movement. Front-page stories underbanner headlines would quote Rizzo's blood-chilling description of the plot,miraculously aborted, and the closeness of the city's escape from destruc-157